Internet Gurus Usenet Page - Finding Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet has tens of thousands of newsgroups on an astounding array of topics. (To read about newsgroups and other forms of online discussions, read Poor Richard's Building Online Communities.) How do you find newsgroups on topics that interest you? Here are a few ways we'd like to suggest. Google's Deja Usenet Archive Google (the powerful search engine) bought Deja.com's archive of Usenet postings in 2000. Go to Google's Deja Usenet Archive at http://groups.google.com lets you search a huge database of newsgroup articles. To search for all the articles that contain a word or phrase, type the word or phrase into the box, and click the Find button. Google searches its database and displays a (usually huge) list of articles that contain that word or phrase. For each article you see the date, the score (how well the article matches your topic), the subject, the newsgroup where the article appears, and the author. The subject of each article is a link; click the subject to see the article. The author name is also a link; click it to see what newsgroups this person posts to. Here's how we usually use Google's archive: we search for our topic and look at a few articles, noting which newsgroups they come from. We quickly figure out which newsgroups seem to carry on discussions that interest us. Then we use our newsreader to subscribe to those newsgroups and read them for a few days.

To see only the newsgroup names rather than the complete list of matching articles, clicklinks in the Relevant groups section of the search results. Liszt's Usenet Newsgroups Directory The Liszt of Newsgroups Web page at http://www.liszt.com/news lets you browse newsgroups by hierarchy or search by keyword. The search looks for newsgroups that contain the word you typed in the name or description of the newsgroup, not in individual articles. Warning -- Topica has acquired Liszt, and may move or get rid of the Usenet directory. Last updated March 12, 2001